THE PAST IN RELIEF: Recent Work by Ana Vaz
Ana Vaz in Person!
The Nightingale Cinema, 1084 N. Milwaukee
Sunday, May 8, 6 pm, $7-10

The work of Ana Vaz confronts our conceptualization of history via themes of colonialism, semiotics, and memory. Vaz creates loose sound and color palettes, imagines impossible pasts, and melds together popular and personal texts all in service of refocusing our understanding of the ages before our own. Vaz reframes well-known historical realities with elements of utopian fantasy and poetic logic but always brings the viewer back to the contemporary moment and its inheritance of complicated forces.

Program Details:
A FILM, RECLAIMED (Ana Vaz & Tristan Bera, 2015, 20’, HD, sound)

The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. “A Film, Reclaimed” is a conversation, a pamphlet that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it. – AV + TB

A IDADE DA PEDRA (2013, 29’, 16mm/HD, sound)

“As artificial as the world must have been when it was created”
A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure – petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. “I look at Brasília the way I look at Rome : Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins”. Through the geological traces that lead us to this fictive monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth. -AV

I PREFER NOT TO BE BUT TO TUPI (2015, 20’, performance, video, sound)

Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade cannibalizes Hamlet in his Anthropophagic Manifesto, a gesture of perspectival shift: Tupi or not not Tupi that is the question. The Amerindian Tupinambá, the Tupi, become the symbolic nexus that roots this shift. Therein, we must remember “we are all indians, expect for the ones who are not”. I Prefer Not to Be but to Tupi is a camouflaged incantation of another film, a literary expansion on and for the cinematic, an opening into a horizon of sonic and textual presences, spectres in/tangled in time and places. – AV

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films and expanded works speculate upon the relationships between self and other, myth and history through a cosmology of signs, references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the frictions and fictions imprinted upon natural and built environments and its multiple inhabitants. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy Studio National, Ana was also a member of SPEAP (School of Political Arts), a project conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings include the New York Film Festival – Projections, TIFF Wavelenghts, CPH:DOX, Videobrasil and Lux Salon. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work.

Programmed by Christy LeMaster

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Tags: Ana Vaz, The Nightingale